A pivoting device of this type is known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,502,598 A. The spherical objective holder is seated on its spherical surface. It has a sector-gear drive with a meridian orientation, and an equatorial sector-gear drive, which is oriented orthogonally thereto, and whose sector gear is located on a sphere segment that can pivot about the axis of the equatorial drive, and whose pivoting axis is displaceable in a groove in the sphere segment, the groove lying in a meridian plane. The drive pinion can be conical to complement the sector gear, and the gear shaft is guided in an equatorial groove on the sphere segment. The drive torque of the gear on the sector gear causes the sphere segment to drift in the groove, depending on the direction of the torque, so no unique relationship exists between the meridian and equatorial objective pivoting and the setting rotations of the two drives, which suffices to pan an objective, but is inadequate for a purposeful camera objective setting.
Furthermore, DE 296 096 U1 discloses a camera setting device in which a cylindrical seating is provided at the foot of an objective frame for pivoting the frame about an axis that intersects the objective axis, and a pivotable seating about a vertical axis that intersects with the other pivoting axis in the optical axis is provided on the seated cylinder segment. Because of the large spacing between the pivot bearing and the optical axis, the bellows adjoining the objective standard often interferes with the beam path when the bellows swings out hard; moreover, the bellows is severely mechanically stressed by a buckling that occurs in the process. Avoiding this often requires a new presetting of the entire camera device. These problems are particularly serious in the use of wide-angle objectives.